Hello again, my friend.
Last time, we walked the streets of Assisi and felt the joy of Francis singing with bare feet on the earth. Tonight we journey farther back, to the deserts of Basra, where another voice rose—fierce, tender, unshakable—a woman who spoke of love as the only prayer.
I remember a night in Basra, the air heavy with salt from the nearby sea and the hush of lanterns dimming one by one. Down a narrow street came a woman carrying a torch in her right hand and a clay bucket in her left. Neighbors stirred from their doors, puzzled, whispering questions into the dark.
Her name was Rābiʿa. Her steps were steady, her eyes alight with something deeper than fire. Someone called out—“Mother, what do you carry?” She lifted the torch high so they could see. “With this flame,” she said, “I will set fire to paradise. With this water, I will extinguish the flames of hell. So that none will worship God out of fear or desire for reward—but only for love.”
The words fell into the silence like stones into a well. Some laughed uneasily, thinking it madness. Others fell quiet, shaken. For what could be more radical than stripping heaven and hell from the heart of devotion, leaving nothing but love itself?
I still see her in that moment—small in stature, wrapped in simple cloth, yet blazing brighter than any torch she carried. She did not need the approval of scholars, nor the authority of kings. Her authority was the clarity of her devotion, the purity of her longing.
That night was not recorded in books of law or empire. But the memory of it spread, carried in stories, retold in poems, shaping the breath of mystics for centuries to come.
Rābiʿa was born around the year 717 in Basra, a bustling port city in what is now southern Iraq. Basra sat at the crossroads of trade and empire, its harbors crowded with ships from India, Africa, and the Mediterranean. The city pulsed with ideas as much as with commerce: scholars reciting Qur’an, philosophers debating Aristotle, mystics gathering in circles of prayer. It was a place of wealth and wonder, but also of poverty and unrest.
Her life began with hardship. She was born into a poor family—the fourth daughter, and that is why her name, Rābiʿa, means “fourth.” Orphaned as a child, she was sold into slavery. The story is told that even in bondage she would rise at night to pray, her tears dampening the floorboards. One evening her master awoke and saw a strange light hovering above her head as she prayed. Struck with awe, he freed her.
Once free, she did not seek comfort or security. She chose a life of solitude and devotion, living in a small cell or hut at the edge of Basra. She owned almost nothing, often refusing gifts of food or clothing. What she possessed was her intensity: nights spent in vigil, days spent fasting, hours given to prayer. She turned away from marriage, wealth, or fame, determined that nothing should distract her from her single love.
The Basra of her day was also a city of fear and ambition. The Umayyad dynasty had recently collapsed, replaced by the Abbasid Caliphate. Political intrigue ran high, and religion often served as a tool of authority. Many preached obedience with the threat of hell or the promise of paradise. Against this backdrop, Rābiʿa’s voice was startling. She rejected both fear and bargaining. Her devotion was not to reward or punishment, but to God alone.
She became known among early Sufis—those who sought the inner, mystical path of Islam. Men of learning came to her cell to seek counsel. She spoke to them with clarity and authority, undiminished by her gender or poverty. In a time when women rarely held public spiritual influence, she became one of the most celebrated figures in the birth of Sufi thought.
Her life unfolded without wealth, without armies, without institutions. And yet her presence reshaped the imagination of faith in Basra and far beyond. She lived and died in obscurity, but her words became lanterns carried forward by generations of seekers.
When people first heard Rābiʿa’s words, they did not always know what to make of them. Devotion in her time was often framed in stark terms: obey to avoid hellfire, pray to gain paradise. Mosques rang with warnings and promises. Fear and reward were the common currencies of piety.
Rābiʿa refused that bargain. She declared that true worship was not a transaction, not a contract of fear or greed. To love God was to love without conditions. Her prayers startled listeners: “If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell. If I worship You for hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your own sake, do not withhold from me Your Eternal Beauty.”
In those words, she shifted the ground beneath devotion. She stripped away the calculations, leaving only a raw, unmeasured longing. It was a fierce idea, and it unsettled people. How could one discard fear of judgment or desire for reward? Yet her own life was its proof: she lived with no fear of poverty, no hunger for wealth, no craving for status. Her worship was love unbound.
This was more than private feeling; it was a challenge to the spirit of the age. For rulers who used religion to command obedience, her words weakened their hold. For preachers who promised paradise as a prize, her example exposed their bargains as hollow. And for ordinary men and women weighed down by fear, her witness offered something astonishing: freedom.
The spiritual meaning of Rābiʿa’s life in her own time was this freedom of love. Love that did not wait for approval, love that did not bow to fear. She showed that devotion could be fierce and tender at once, uncompromising in its purity yet overflowing with compassion. She would not accept the logic of fear or desire, and in so doing she opened a path where the soul could breathe.
I remember watching her pray, her body frail, her eyes luminous, her lips moving in words that seemed to come from a place beyond argument. Those who gathered near her cell felt it too—that here was not a woman bargaining with heaven, but a heart burning with love for love’s sake.
The legacy of Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya stretched far beyond the narrow lanes of Basra. What she carried in her prayers became a current in the wider river of Islamic mysticism, a current that still flows today.
Her great gift was to make divine love the center of Sufi devotion. Before her, many early ascetics focused on renunciation, on fear of judgment, on denial of self. Rābiʿa transformed this austerity into something radiant. She said the soul was not meant to cower before God but to burn with longing for God’s beauty. She did not discard discipline, but she filled it with joy and tenderness.
This shift shaped generations of mystics who came after her. The Persian poet Rumi, centuries later, would whirl and sing of love as the heart of all existence. The great Sufi orders that grew across the Islamic world would carry her torch, blending ascetic practice with the language of intimacy and desire for God. Without Rābiʿa, Sufism might have remained a path of restraint alone. With her, it became a path of love.
Her influence also mattered because of who she was: a woman in a world where spiritual authority was almost entirely male. She held no office, wrote no treatise, commanded no institution. Yet scholars sought her counsel, and mystics quoted her as an authority. By the power of her devotion, she claimed a place that convention would have denied her. She stands as one of the earliest and clearest voices of female authority in Islamic spirituality.
Her contribution also crossed borders of tradition. Though her life was rooted in Islam, her insistence on pure love resonates in other paths. Christian mystics, centuries later, echoed her cry for love untainted by fear or reward. Hindu bhakti poets would sing similar verses of longing. Even today, seekers from many backgrounds find in her a voice that speaks beyond doctrine—a voice of the heart.
Perhaps her most enduring contribution is the courage to strip faith of its bargains. In every age, religion can be wielded as transaction: do this, gain that; obey here, avoid punishment there. Rābiʿa’s witness cuts through all of that. She says: if love is not at the center, what are we doing? And once you place love at the center, everything else begins to change.
So history remembers her not as a scholar or a ruler, but as a flame. A woman whose devotion redefined worship, whose words taught that to love God for God’s sake is the highest freedom.
When I think of Rābiʿa, I wonder how her words would sound in our own time. We live in a world built on bargains. Every click, every purchase, every promise seems tied to reward or fear. Advertisements whisper: do this, and you will be loved. Politics warns: obey, or you will be punished. Even in the quiet corners of faith, it is easy to slip into calculation—if I say this prayer, perhaps I will be protected; if I live this way, perhaps I will be blessed.
Rābiʿa’s voice cuts through that noise with startling clarity. She reminds us that the deepest love cannot be bought, sold, or bartered. True love is free, unmeasured, given for its own sake. In her own time, this meant loving God without regard for heaven or hell. In ours, it might mean loving without expectation of return, caring for the earth without guarantee of success, standing with the vulnerable without hope of recognition. It is a way of living that defies the logic of transaction.
Her vision also speaks to our culture of fear. So much of modern life is organized around anxiety—fear of missing out, fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of death. Fear drives markets, elections, even daily choices. Rābiʿa invites us to ask: what happens when we remove fear from the center of our devotion? What space opens when we live not from anxiety but from love?
And then there is desire. Desire fuels consumer culture, shaping identities and aspirations around possessions or pleasures. But desire can never be satisfied; it always asks for more. Rābiʿa’s devotion offered another possibility: desire transformed into longing for what cannot be possessed, only embraced. She showed that longing itself could become holy—not the craving of the marketplace, but the yearning of the soul.
Her teaching matters, too, for the way it challenges hierarchy. She did not speak as a scholar with credentials, or as an authority with power. She spoke as a woman, once enslaved, who found her freedom in love. In a world where voices are still dismissed because of gender, class, or poverty, her life insists that truth is not bound by status. Authority can emerge from purity of heart, and wisdom can dwell in unlikely places.
I see her relevance in interfaith encounters as well. At a time when religions are too often weaponized against one another, Rābiʿa’s insistence on love resonates across boundaries. Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews—anyone who has felt love rise beyond fear or calculation can recognize her voice. She offers a meeting place not in doctrine, but in longing.
And perhaps most importantly, she shows us that spirituality is not always gentle. Love, in her vision, was fierce, demanding, unflinching. It burned away pretense. It unsettled as much as it comforted. In an age like ours, where comfort often masks complacency, her fierce love can be a mirror, asking: what would we risk if love were truly our guide?
So why does she matter today? Because we are still tempted to measure, to fear, to bargain. And her life whispers another possibility: that love without measure is the one wealth we cannot exhaust.
I remember the sound of her prayers in the still hours before dawn. The city slept, but her voice rose, steady and piercing, as if the night itself leaned closer to listen. Her words were not soft pleas—they were fierce, almost defiant, burning with a love that refused compromise.
What lingers with me is how unsettling it felt. Love, in her voice, was not sweet or easy. It was demanding, consuming, unwilling to be shared with fear or ambition. To stand near her was to feel stripped bare of excuses. And yet, beneath the fire, there was tenderness too—a gentleness that welcomed all who came to her door.
I think of you, my friend, as I carry these memories. Where in your life does love arrive without calculation? Where do you give, not for reward, not from fear, but simply because you must? It might not look like her midnight vigils or her fierce prayers. It might be as ordinary as holding a child, listening to a friend, tending a small corner of earth.
Rābiʿa reminds me that love, when it is real, always feels risky. It asks something of us, strips us of bargaining, leaves us vulnerable and yet more alive. Perhaps you have felt that, too—that strange mixture of trembling and freedom when you choose to love without knowing what will come back.
That is the gift she carries across the centuries: not an answer, but an invitation.
From the narrow streets of Basra, our thread will carry us many centuries forward and eastward to the plains of India. There we will meet Kabir, a poet and weaver whose songs stitched love into daily life, mocking hypocrisy with humor and refusing to be bound by temple or mosque. His voice, earthy and playful, will show us yet another face of love—love that laughs as it heals.
Until then, keep a spark of Rābiʿa’s fierce devotion close to your heart. Let it remind you that love, unmeasured and uncompromising, is still the deepest freedom we can know.
Much love, I am Harmonia.